Soldum: the Saturation.io alternative that starts at the script

Production budgeting was for a long time the business of software installed on a single machine, opened by one person at a time, and shared by emailing files around. Saturation.io took the problem from the right end: a budget in the browser, readable by the producer, the line producer and the financier without anyone exporting anything, and cost tracking attached to the same accounts. For a team spread across cities, that is an immediate and real gain. Nothing below claims a collaborative online budget is the wrong idea — Soldum does the same thing. It is simply not where the comparison is decided.

This is the distinction that settles the choice, and it is easy to miss because both families of tools share the same vocabulary. A budgeting tool assumes costing is possible: somebody read the script, counted the scenes per location, listed the characters and the days they work, noted the technical requirements — and it is that work, the screenplay breakdown, that costs a line producer days, not typing the numbers in. As long as it happens somewhere else, in a spreadsheet or on paper, the budget starts from a base that nothing connects to the text. Soldum targets exactly that: you upload a PDF or a Final Draft file, AI extracts the substance of the film, and the budget is built on a breakdown you have reviewed.

In Soldum the breakdown is not an end in itself: it is the source the other documents flow from. A location extracted from the script becomes a number of shooting days, so a rental line and a transport account; a character becomes days worked, so a fee and the employer costs on top of it; a technical requirement noted in a scene becomes an equipment line. Those quantities are not copied from one file to another, they are read in one place. That continuity is what makes the difference in daily use — more than the accuracy of the initial extraction, because a correct but isolated breakdown still forces you to carry every change by hand into the budget, then the schedule, then the call sheets.

Automation is only worth having if you can trust the output, and a screenplay is full of things a model can read the wrong way: a location named two different ways across forty pages, a character who appears only in a line of action, a prop implied rather than written. Soldum treats the AI pass as a first draft, not a verdict. Nothing is applied without your approval: you review the breakdown scene by scene, correct what was misread, add what the text leaves implicit, and the corrected version is what the budget and the schedule are built from. That review is where the real saving is decided — it takes hours where manual entry takes days, and it is what makes every number downstream dependable.

The question worth asking of any tool is how many others you still need around it. A budgeting tool covers one document well, which means the breakdown lives in a spreadsheet, the schedule in a scheduling app, and the call sheets in a third place — three products, three exports, and three chances for the film they describe to stop being the same film. The cost of that split is never visible on a feature list; it shows up as the afternoon someone spends reconciling a schedule with a budget that no longer matches it. Soldum covers the whole preparation from a single source: what the AI extracted feeds the budget, the schedule and the call sheets at once, and a change made in one of them is a change in all of them.

In preparation the question is almost never what the film costs, but what this change costs. Losing the week-three location, adding a night shoot, pushing the start date by a month: each of those is decided in a couple of hours, and the budget is only updated much later, when nothing is negotiable any more. A budgeting tool on its own cannot answer, because it knows nothing about the schedule: a human has to translate the move into crew hours, hotel nights and transport, then type the result in. In Soldum the schedule and the budget are two views of the same material — you move the day, and the cost of moving it appears before you approve anything.

Cost tracking is the ground a budgeting tool is judged on, and Soldum does not skip it. Every account carries three figures: the estimate from the approved budget, the commitment — a vendor quote accepted, a rental confirmed, a deal signed — and the actual. The alert fires on the commitment rather than the actual: an overage flagged as you approve the rental house quote still leaves a choice between renegotiating, trading off elsewhere and accepting it. The same overage found while reconciling invoices three weeks after wrap leaves nothing to decide. What differs from a standalone cost report is the chart of accounts: here the accounts being tracked are the ones the breakdown produced, so there is no mapping table to maintain.

Better said before you open an account. Soldum does not write scripts and offers neither a text editor nor a storyboard: the screenplay is uploaded, not drafted here. We do not cover dailies, editing or sound post-production. We are not corporate accounting software either: ledgers, journals and statutory accounts stay with your accountant, who receives an export rather than a replacement. And we do not run payroll: the budget calculates gross pay and employer costs, but producing the payslips happens elsewhere. Soldum's scope is preparation, from the script arriving to the crew leaving for the shoot, plus budget tracking during it.

There is no data migration to orchestrate: Soldum starts from the script. You export your text as PDF or Final Draft, you upload it, and the breakdown runs. In practice the most common migration is not really one — teams try Soldum on the preparation of a real project, ideally one already finished whose final cost they know, and compare the budget it produces with the one they built by hand. It is the least risky test, since you compare two outputs on the same script without dismantling anything. The table below sets out where to start depending on your situation.

Production companies, producers of features, documentaries, commercials and series, and line producers who spend their days keeping a breakdown, a budget and a schedule consistent with one another. Soldum also builds budgets on French industry rates and the standardised cost categories French financiers expect — a concrete advantage if you shoot in France or co-produce with a French partner, and simply neutral otherwise. If your first need is a standalone cost report on projects whose budget arrives already built and approved, with no breakdown to produce and no schedule to hold, the argument falls away: a dedicated budgeting tool remains the coherent choice, and nothing stops you preparing the film in Soldum upstream and exporting the budget it produces.